


In God's Country

by Las



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angels, Biblical References, Cigarettes, Desert, Dreams, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-15
Updated: 2011-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-14 18:53:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Las/pseuds/Las
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the AU prompt, "Castiel is Dean's imaginary friend". Sort of. Set during Stanford era and pre-series, with bits of other seasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In God's Country

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Zempasuchil for betareading.

Dean gets into a bar brawl in a little bumfuck town outside of Bangor, Maine, gets beaten all to shit. There are – four guys on him? Five? He's too drunk for numbers, too wild for coordination, and they leave him in the parking lot staring up at the mess of stars above.

Is this it? If only he could manage laughter. Spend your whole life fighting monsters and complicated shadows, and is the end gonna come from a handful of New England rednecks just because Dean didn't feel like knowing any better? Tonight he'd pushed a little more than usual, letting whiskey convince himself of the valiance of it. Let his words get a little smart, pushed his bets up a little high, and when comeuppance came up, well, Dean wasn't surprised.

The pain and the drunk don't leave a lot of space for other things, but the stillness of the night invites some semblance of clarity, and habit reopens old wounds. No Sam asking him where it hurts this time, and no Dad giving him shit for it. The former is in Palo Alto, the latter in Ypsilanti. These days, Dean is blessed with the curse of independence, a one-man roadshow criss-crossing the land of the free in his beast of a car, trunk full of ammo and a flask of whiskey in the glove compartment. Yup, he is free, so fucking free, and a man who doesn't appreciate freedom deserves a fist to the face, is what he figures, so actually this night makes a lot of sense.

Dean tries to get up, but putting weight on his hands only sparks agony in his shoulder.

“Fuckin' perfect,” Dean mutters, and collapses back on the gravel. There is a sound like the rustle of wings, and then the world goes black.

+

He wakes up in the back of the Impala. Someone is knocking on the window.

A gruff face looks in on him, breath fogging up the window. “What are you doing here, son?”

“Wha--?”

“You can't stay here.”

Sunlight says it’s next morning. Dean's watch says it’s quarter past six.

“Better get a move on, boy.” Then, as if in afterthought, “You okay?”

“'M fine.” An automatic reply. Sleeping in his car outside a bar is nothing new, and all Dean wants to do is get away from this goddamn bar and goddamn Maine. He climbs into the driver's seat as the man attempts sympathy: “Rough night?”

“Yup,” Dean mumbles. He sticks his key in the ignition, and doesn't forget to wish the guy a nice day. Fucker.

He's almost on the interstate and just about done with his morning cigarette when last night starts to bleed into his mind. The bits and pieces fall into place as he stitches the memory of his fifth drink to the face of the bruiser who threw the first punch. That, stitched to the sound of pool balls clattering to the floor, and somewhere in all that, someone called someone else a punk-ass motherfucker.

Dean flicks the butt out the window.

The cigarettes are a new thing, a now thing. A resurgence from his younger days of regimented rebellion. Drunk at fourteen, stoned at same, and on one memorable day at the tender age of sixteen, Dean ate half an eighth of shrooms and stalked around their house-of-the-moment hunting imaginary gremlins. He had gotten his jollies out of smoking by the time he was seventeen, or so he thought. A few months after he and Dad parted ways, Dean bought a pack of Camels and smoked two straight off. It seemed like the thing to do. He's on the road with no one but the radio these days, and no voice but his own. Suddenly it's just miles and miles of road and sky; everywhere for restlessness to skitter and nothing on which it can snag.

He checks himself in the rear-view. The shades of bruise around his eyes, bleary with hangover, and the dark clot on the side of his head that bled like son of a bitch last night. When Dean touches his scalp, the dried blood crusts off and there is barely a scar. Didn't he break a couple of ribs? He touches his jaw, and it doesn't feel fractured anymore. He tries to place when exactly during the night someone kicked his chest, but he can't quite recall.

 _You are one lucky bastard, Dean Winchester_ , he tells himself, but he is mindful of the familiar unease in his gut.

Dad used to say Dean had a lucky streak a mile wide. All the times growing up when Dean blacked out from pain or blood loss, and the next thing he knew, he was in his father's arms, in Sam's, their faces swirling into focus as their voices phased in from a far ledge. _Dean, are you okay?_ And he was.

At the next gas station, Dean splashes his face in the washroom and leans on the sink, looking at his reflection. The dark smudges around his eyes make the green look that much brighter. Then Dean ventures, then he dares, he almost backs down and then dares to remember because there is no other explanation:

“So you're back, huh?” he says.

There is no answer, just as he hoped, or feared.

+

Seventeen years old and Dean already knew to trust no one and nothing. The day after Dean chased down a sigbin and survived a tumble off the edge of a rock quarry with only minor cuts and bruises, he asked his father, “Do you think something's working some mojo on me?”

His father frowned. “What? Why?”

How about the time that werewolf had its claws sunk deep between Dean's ribs? The time the nix pulled Dean underwater, and five endless minutes later he resurfaced, gasping but alive? There was the time his leg bone snapped when they hunted that wendigo up north, but by the time Sam found him, Dean was already on his feet, without pain, with bewilderment. It didn't happen often, but when it did, it turned him suspicious. He doesn't like being indebted to things he can't see.

You trust instinct in this business, and you trust family, so even though his father was doubtful, he took Dean to some friends of his: the priestesses in cutoff jeans, psychics in Hendrix t-shirts, and the soothsayers who read his aura as they casually rolled a joint. Nothing turned up. Your son's ghost-free, John. No scent of demons around him, no spirits, no nothing. His aura's clear, and his heart line has a sweet curve to it. Whatever that meant. And all the while, Sammy in the background, cynical and bored, and Dad's eyes always going to the clock.

Driving back home, Dad said, “All clear,” in that tight-lipped way he got when he discovered that the monster he'd been hunting was only some kids' idea of a prank, or a man with a fetish, a woman with a grudge.

“Normal as Marcia Brady,” Sam muttered.

Dean said, “Guess that makes you Jan.”

“Well, then let's not start pulling each other's pigtails, girls,” their father said. “We got a ways to go to and I like my road trips headache-free.” So he turned Led Zeppelin all the way up.

+

Dean drives south on I-71, Black Sabbath playing at a modest volume. He’s halfway through his cigarette when he says, “So where were you last night?”

Last night Dean killed three ghouls, barely. He takes another drag, breathing out smoke and the question, “Some other guy to save?”

He waits for the relief of insanity to fall on him.

“Fucking things nearly tore me in two,” he mutters, and feels himself blush, this is so fucking ridiculous. Dean fumbles for his cellphone and calls Bobby about the chupacabra in Texas. At least Bobby talks back.

+

The next time they were at Singer Salvage Yard after that last psychic, Dean took the opportunity to paw through Bobby's extensive library, and Sam raised an eyebrow.

“What are you doing?” he asked, and Dean retorted, “What does it look like?” And Sam, good ol' Sammy, for all his bitching and burgeoning teenage resentment, just rolled his eyes, and settled himself in one of Bobby's rickety chairs. He started in on one of the huge tomes, and occasionally he'd say things like, “Hey, there's something here about guardian spirits,” or, “This one says something about healing rituals.”

Leads that led nowhere about things that didn't exist. Sometime around midnight, about an hour after Dad's yelling match with Bobby and resultant departure, Bobby remembered to yell at the boys to go to bed. Dean fell asleep with dead languages dancing across his eyelids, all the calligraphy and hieroglyphs holding someone else's answers. Yellowed pages and pentacles and woodcuts of ancient monsters.

And then he heard a voice, or several. It was the first time Dean had dreamed of the thing, who then said to him:

_You seek me out when I've already found you. You fear me when, with me, you should be least afraid._

A chill settled upon him, and with it came the gold-edged haziness that Dean had come to associate with last-minute second chances (third chances, fourth chances, fifth). He said, _Wait_. He started to say, _Who_ , but his dream began to roil around him, pulling him away.

_You have been chosen, Dean Winchester. Have faith. We watch over you._

_Chosen for what?_ Dean asked, but already the world was slipping. _Hey! Chosen for what?_

+

Some crap motel on the edge of Yardley, Pennsylvania. Dean is half a bottle in and calling Sam for the third time, and still no answer.

“What the fuck, Sam,” Dean mutters. “What the _fuck_ ,” he cries out, hating California with a deep and sudden vengeance. Then again, Dad couldn't hold the family together either, so maybe like father like son. Dean lolls back on the bed, giving himself up to the drunk, letting himself slip in and out, and suddenly protests, “But there’s no such thing as destiny.”

He realizes belatedly that he is protesting to an empty room. He finds himself waiting for a reply anyway.

+

More than Dad's magical friends, if there was anything to convince Dean it was all in his head, that first dream was it. You're a special fucking snowflake, Dean! How embarrassing. Strange voices in his dreams promising him things he stopped wanting long ago. Get the fuck out of here.

What was this thing spewing glorious futures like some two-bit politician? It was difficult to focus on it, on the voice, the creature, whatever it was – difficult even for dreams. It took a while for Dean to learn to chase it down, because it's difficult to run in dreams, but once he got the hang of it, he’d chase it through the hollows of his restlessness and the tight enclosures of pride, past giant herons that were his brother and up a starlit sky that was his mother. Sometimes he chased a cloud of light, and sometimes it was shadows; its form always shifted: a lion, an ox, a silhouette of wings. Dean would recognize it anyway.

 _I'm not the one you should be hunting_ , it said, and Dean replied, _Bullshit_. Dean said, _You stop right there, you son of a bitch._

At first, it never would, until the night Dean almost let an ifrit make a barbecue of Sam. Dean was yelling stop, yelling wait, the panic of the day polluting his subconscious. He chased it with an inability to slow down, and yelled curses so hard that he didn’t realize the thing had actually stopped, and that he had run right into the middle of it. The shock of it, the blinding presence of it, and Dean opened his mouth and his mouth filled with light, muting his words and spreading across his chest, behind his eyes.

 _How easily you let yourself break_. It was a voice that thrummed and hummed, wondering and curious. Dean could feel it hushing the anger in him, unfolding the creases of his fear. _How high the price you pay for righteousness._

A brush of something soft against his cheek, and some quiet breeze that breathed for him until his breaths were deep and easy, until his heart beat a steady rhythm, one two, one two.

When Dean woke up, it was still the middle of the night. Sam was in the next bed over, and so was Dad, in rare form, sleeping leaning back against the headboard with Sam’s bandaged head on his lap. He had his arm around Sam’s shoulders because apparently almost dying was the only legitimate reason for physical affection in the Winchester family.

Dean got the feeling like someone was watching him, but that was only the disorientation of a dream that struck too close to home. What else could it be? What was the exact sensation of being engulfed by the light, cradled close like a child? He rolled over and closed his eyes, waiting for sleep, which in times like these would come gentle as a feather, soft.

+

Dean is going crazy, and that's the long and short of it.

Maybe he's been crazy all along, so good thing Sam left, 'cause who needs a crazy older brother. Who needs a father obsessed and a brother haunted by miracles.

Dean smokes a cigarette with bloody fingers, sitting on a boulder and waiting for the chupacabra at his feet to stop twitching. It's making these keening noises, and all the malice in the creature's eyes have filtered down to terror and pain. _Just die_ , Dean thinks at it. _Just fucking let go_ , but after a few more drags of the cigarette, Dean can't take it anymore. He takes his knife and slashes its throat before plunging the blade between its ribs.

He's somewhere in west Texas, dust-covered and thirsty, and he raises his head to the sky as a breeze blows in from the east. The cigarette only worsens the thirst, but he's made a habit of smoking one per monster ganked now, sometimes two if it’s been an especial pain in the ass. And he thinks of Sam. What would Sam do now, what would Sam have done differently, what stupid jokes would Sam make, and what reasons would Sam give for why Dean's new vice is untenable and entirely gross. What a strange world it is where his brother isn't by his side. Dean'd be about to glance over at the passenger seat to ask Sam what he wants for dinner before remembering that he'll probably never have to ask Sam that question again.

Dean gives it a few days before the dreams start up again. He knows the signs by now. He’ll be waking up achy from rest-stop naps and four hour bursts in shitty motels, trying to untangle reality from dreams of light and fire. The incandescence will fill his eyes until he doesn't know light from blindness, succor from drowning. There will be a many-throated voice that he hears not with the ears, but with the heart, telling him he is special. It's in his blood, and _the years have aligned to put you here, Dean Winchester, and you will rise above them all._

Dean knows from countless hours of crime shows that delusions of grandeur are just down the street from a straitjacket. Anyone who watches that much TV picks up enough pop psychology to know that such dreams are just manifestations of loneliness and antipathy, or some shit. Anyone who lives this life walks the tightrope between insanity and survival anyway, and it's not like Dean is any different.

_You will be the sword that creates the world anew._

In the dreams he feels, not soothed, but received. Not understood, but promised.

_Your story has been written long before you tried to keep it from falling apart._

Dean turns up the collar of his jacket. The wind has picked up, and he should probably get a move on.

+

Nineteen years old and Dean had never felt more like a child, so small in the face of his father’s fury. Like most things in Dean’s life, it began with Sam, or in this case, the absence of Sam, along with his backpack, and the $300 emergency cash that Dean kept in a sock at the bottom of his duffel.

“What the fuck were you doing, Dean?” Dad demanded. “Where the fuck were you?”

‘At the 7-11’ was such a pitiful answer.

“It's your goddamn chess set, Bobby,” Dean muttered over the phone. Behind him, Dad was two drinks in and calling a friend of a friend up in Tucson. “Fuckin' shoulda never gave it to him in the first place.”

Come on, just one game, Sam had said. Play me, and if I win, you buy me a pint of Half Baked, and Dean said no, fuck that. Fuck that, Sam always won anyway. This was just a transparent attempt to boss Dean around, little kid brother flexing the only power he had. This was five bucks they could be using for something else. But Sam nagged and nagged, and in due time, Dean was checkmated and stepping out to buy Sam his goddamn ice cream. When he came back, Sam was gone.

“Watch your language, boy,” Bobby replied. “Don't blame me if you can't play chess worth a damn.”

They spent all next day canvassing the town, but Patagonia, Arizona refused to cough up any clues and thus any hope, so what was there left to do but leave? Let Patagonia deal with its own shapeshifter problem. When they weren’t searching or sleeping, they were on the phone with friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances of acquaintances, asking them to keep a lookout for Sam, about five-foot-eight now, shaggy brown hair, and John's gonna kill him when he finds that fucking kid so help him god.

Dean should’ve been a better chess player.

They headed east, Dad figuratively laughing in the face of speed limits. A few miles into New Mexico, Dean slumped back in his seat and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the highway stretched out in all directions and slithered like a snake. Above him, the stars shivered and trailed afterimages in the sky. As was the way of dreams, Dean was suddenly imbued with the certainty that Sam was close.

He stepped on the gas, but it was hard to go forward when the fucking roads kept fucking twisting in on themselves. Sometimes Dean didn't even know whether he was going east or west, north or south. Somewhere on the periphery of this world, Sam was waiting with a promise and a smile, so Dean thought fuck it: he yanked the wheel to the left and drove straight into the desert. There are no distractions in the desert. In a place like that, you can find anything. You see ghosts in the thermals, and the end of the world in the rippling horizon. In the desert, Abraham was given a nation, Moses was given the word of God, and Dean perhaps would be given Sam.

The Impala rocked and jolted under him, but when he looked down, it was only his feet. Dean ran. He yelled his brother's name into the vastness and it echoed back at him from all directions, the way it never would in real life with nothing to reflect it. The hoarse sea of Sams and Sammys subsided, and that was when Dean heard it: the deep syllable that rose through the sibilance and hum.

_Dean._

He stopped and whirled around. Nothing behind him, nothing around. Above him, only tremulous constellations.

 _You are troubled_ , said the desert, who wasn't a desert after all.

Dean should've known. It had been a while.

 _No shit, Sherlock_ , he said. _Where's my brother? Give him back._

_I didn't take your brother._

_Yeah, fine. Look, I don't know what your game is, but you've saved my ass a bunch of times now, so don't pretend like you don't care. If you can save me, then you can save Sam._

The dust shifted. _Your brother doesn't need saving._

_Take me to him._

_He's not my responsibility._

_What, and I am?_

The slightest of hesitations and the shudder of starlight before the reply: _Yes._

 _If I'm your responsibility_ , Dean said, _then so is Sam, 'cause he's mine_. Hackles rising, the bile of anxiety in his gut. _Who the hell are you, anyway?_

_I'm what you need me to be, so you can be who we need you to be._

_Who the hell is 'we'?_

_Everyone. Everything._

_Fuck that. Fuck you, where's Sam?_ Whoever it was that said things were easier in dreams had no idea what they were talking about. _If you can bring me back from the dead, you can find Sam._

_That's not--_

_If you don't, I swear to fucking god I'll kill myself, I'll cut myself up. I'll burn myself to ashes and you won't be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again._

_Who is Humpty Dumpty?_

Dean wondered whether he should even dignify that with a response.

The desert said, _I can raise you from ashes. I can raise you from Hell if need be._

_Give me my brother back._

_Dean--_

_Give me my brother back!_ Dean thundered, and the gold on horizon fanned outward, and then it wasn't just on the horizon – the light was all around. The desert faded into its radiance, or was consumed by it, and even if this was just a dream, Dean found himself having to shield his eyes.

 _Dean_ , said the dying desert, said the incandescent light. _This is not the way._

 _So what the hell are you good for?_ Through the slats of his fingers, Dean sees impossible shapes in the light – a winged ox, a lion with a mane of fire, a man eating lightning bolts.

 _I am to keep you whole_ , said the head of an eagle, _and to keep you righteous._

_So give me Sam._

_Dean—_

_Give me Sam._

The world flickered and flared and, to Dean's surprise, surrendered. _You are as you've been written, in unexpected ways_ , it conceded. The whiteness around him shifted in fabric from dream to memory and--

> He and Sam pass the bottled water back and forth as they hike up the foothills, and it's one of those perfect days. The sky's a wash of blue with the brush-strokes of cirrus clouds. It's warm, but there's a cool wind. They have been in this place for three months now, the longest in a while, and there’s something about this place. It brings out a peace in Sammy that Dean doesn't see a lot of anymore.
> 
> Sam's telling him about some friends he made at school, the science club or whatever, maybe the quizbowl, maybe both. “I'm going to David's place tomorrow, there's a study group,” Sam is saying, “and RJ made flashcards.”
> 
> “Do RJ and David get stuffed in lockers a lot?” Dean asks, and Sam ignores him and starts talking about star formations.
> 
> Sam is talking about star formations, so Dean tunes him out, but the tail end of Sam's nerdy soliloquy snaps him back.
> 
> “...hope Dad's gone a while.”
> 
> “What?”
> 
> Sam stops in his tracks and looks at his brother, something fragile in his defiance. Not even defiance, just the automatic defensiveness that locks into place whenever anything Dad-related comes up.
> 
> “I hope Dad's gone a while,” Sam repeats. “I like it here.” Then he just glares at Dean like he expects Dean to start wagging his finger. But all Dean says is, “Yeah, Flagstaff's not so bad, huh?”
> 
> “We could stay here,” Sam ventures. “We could come back. After we find the thing that killed Mom, we can come back and live here.”
> 
> “You can be some pencil-pusher and wear ugly-ass ties to work.”
> 
> Sam tries to smirk, but it comes out too much as a smile. “Yeah,” says Sam, “I could. Except my ties would rock your face off, so shut up.”

  
And then Dean woke up.

“Jesus, Dean,” said Dad, because Dean woke up with a jerk and a gasp, eyes snapping open.

“Turn around,” Dean blurted out. “Dad, turn around. I know where Sam is.”

+

Tennessee is so full of caves that Dean wonders how it doesn’t just collapse in on itself sometimes, all that state on all those holes. Hunters from these parts pass around stories of friends vanishing into the dark, never to be seen again. They're the kind of stories that catalyze hyperbole, buttressing anecdotes about tracking monsters through the darkness for days, navigating by touch and smell and instinct. How cold the mud, how pitch the black, the columns cold as scales, and the limestone curtains that hang like warnings.

Dean is mistaking bravado for instinct these days, so this is what he gets. The flickering flashlight is the only thing keeping simulated blindness at bay, and he thinks, _I'm not afraid of death_. He doesn't want to call it sour grapes, but what else do you call it when you're broken-boned and bleeding deep in the bowels of the earth?

The werewolf is dead, but it put up a hell of a fight, and now Dean can barely move, can barely function through the pain. He can feel himself slipping, and wonders who will salt and burn his body now.

_Dean._

A girl in Bismarck once told Dean he was a bad idea and a half, and he had liked the rough-and-tumble sound of it. Dean is at least a bunch of bad ideas, and here's one more: chasing a werewolf into the labyrinthine caves under Lookout Mountain in the middle of the night. The caves give the werewolf the advantage in all sorts of ways, but Dean only hesitated for a few seconds before he found himself clambering on in.

_Dean, close your eyes._

He obeys before he even realizes it's a command.

The world glows red through his eyelids, and Dean can feel his bones knit whole. He is aware of every snapped capillary braiding itself together again, and his blood refilling them.

He asks, _Is this a dream?_

_That was foolish._

_Your mom's foolish._

_You knew this was a bad idea. You knew you shouldn't have entered the caves._

_Would you have come otherwise?_

The red develops shadows, growing darker here, more crimson there. The cooling at his wounds dims, like a held breath. The voice, the thing, says, _My brothers were right._

Dean perks up at unexpected information. _You have brothers?_

_This isn't the way. You forced my hand, Dean, but it isn't the time._

_How many brothers you got?_

_Dean._

He isn't aware of his body anymore, whether he still has one or whether he's just a collection of insolent wounds floating in space. He reaches out, and isn't sure whether he's reaching out with arms or something truer than flesh. Still, he feels something reach back, winding around his borders, whispering close without constricting.

Dean asks, _What are you?_

_I'm the one who'll walk beside you on your chosen path. But not yet._

The jagged edges of his pain have blurred out now, the dull throbbing quieted to a hum.

 _I didn't_ , Dean says, _choose any goddamn path._

_I didn't say it was you who chose it._

+

Dean fires twice in quick succession and the shifter slams back against the wall, and falls across the chairs like an offering. And that's that.

It's the weirdest fucking thing, seeing yourself die. A dazed thought skitters across his mind: this must've been what it saw, his guardian thing or whatever, all those times. Swooping in from wherever it hangs out to zero in on whatever bloody situation Dean has gotten himself into, and this is what it sees. Which wound would it heal first?

He hasn't thought about the thing in ages, not since Dad vanished from Jericho, not since Sam came back. Maybe it goes both ways: no miracles have visited Dean since Tennessee, except the one that returned his brother to him.

Dean approaches the body slowly. He closes his hand around his amulet hanging from the shifter's neck, and yanks; the leather snaps. He puts it in his pocket, and looks back at Sam and Becky. “Let's go.”

He's on his third beer that night before he admits to himself that he half-expected the thing to show up. Not that it would. If it's smart enough to bring people back from the edge of death, then it would know a shifter from the real McCoy.

But still.

“Earth to Dean. Hey.”

“What?”

Sam gives him this look that's half “you're weird” and half “are you okay?” and Dean grins. For all their push and pull, he's settling into this. They're settling into this. It's been four years, and four years too long, but now his brother is back by his side, and give it time, but soon it'll be like the old days. It'll be like Sam never left at all, and Dean thinks to himself isn't this all he ever wanted? Isn't this what Dean would have prayed for, if he were the praying type, all those months ago when it was just him and the Impala and the air shot through with the echoes of a dream?

+

It's half past three in the morning when Sam falls asleep curled up at the foot of Dean's bed. They'd been in the middle of talking about – what else? – Hell. Dean made some emphatic drunken point about Sam soldiering on without him, and then said, “Right?” Then, “Sam?” And Sam snored in reply. Sure knows how to make a guy feel special, that one. It had been a pretty good speech, too.

Dean leans back against the headboard, the last bottle of beer in his hand, and catalogs the details of his brother. Remember the croak of Sam’s snore and the mess of his hair. Remember the shadows under his eyes, testament to the sleep he lost to the fear of losing Dean.

No, don't remember that.

Remember instead: listening to Led Zep's VI on repeat while arguing over the difference between classic rock and hair rock; poltergeists in Evanston and aswangs in San Jose; throwing fries at each other in that diner outside of Ellensburg, the one that serves the best chili cheese fries in the northwest. Remember all that, because in two weeks, it'll be goodbye.

But Dean remembers, too, incandescent light and the impression of wings. He’s pretty sure by now that it had all been in his head; hallucinations caused by wanderlust and a silence that got loud. That's what madness does to silence; it turns up the volume. He never had a guardian angel pulling him back from death’s precipice. Of course not. Dean is a good hunter and, at times, a lucky man, and destiny has no place in its stubborn mystery for a guy like him.

“So fuck you, you bastard,” Dean mutters. “Going to hell and there ain’t nothin’ you can do.”

Yeah, it doesn't exist, which is why Dean is talking to it.

“Look what you been savin’ all those years.” He throws a bottlecap at the TV, and it plinks off the screen. “Is this in my fuckin' blood, asshole, huh? Pull some fuckin' Jean Grey Phoenix shit? Am I still gonna fuckin' rise?”

_Yes._

That’s how Dean knows he’s fallen asleep, or is back to crazy. There is a wild-eyed spark in him hoping that maybe he is neither. It startles him how familiar this feels, like something Dean hadn't realized he's forgotten. Is it still watching over him? Is he still special?

 _Yes_ , it says. _Yes, more than ever._

+

The rooftop clatters and the lightbulbs explode. The barn doors burst open. Dean squints through the shower of sparks, and he and Bobby raise their guns.

With the impromptu strobe lights staggering the shadows, the symbols on the wall seem to writhe and threaten. It brings to mind demons in their true form, yanking an apprehensive reflex from Dean. The man walks to them with a steady gait and, against the backdrop of twisting runes, he seems to change form with every flash of light and thunder: a winged lion, an ox with stars for horns, an eagle with burning wheels for eyes. Then the lights go out completely, and he is just a man harboring an unearthly power within.

The guy doesn't even flinch when the rounds hit. His eyes bore into Dean's, and that's when Dean suspects. There are flames that crackle there, but it's not the hellfire that Dean has come to know so well, although they are not any less ferocious for it. That's when Dean recognizes. He is reminded of the ground falling away beneath him, and the cries of the damned becoming faint. He remembers the fire and the blade receding, and the sensation of being engulfed in light. A restoration story; a resurrection tale. Dean knows this story, has lived it, and died it; he can recite it by heart.

The man who isn't a man draws closer. Dean's gut twists in warning, but he knows he isn't as scared as he should be.

“Who are you?” Dean demands, but he thinks, and he hopes, that he already knows.


End file.
